as you might have seen, this time's Ludum Dare topic was 10 seconds. This is the post-mortem version of my entry called Logic Bomb.

Basically the story is that you are a bomb defusion specialist that is called when a bomb is about to explode to cut the "right" wire. And, surprisingly you only have 10 seconds left.

I thought a lot about how to put the experience of real bomb defusion into this game. So I came up with logic gates (AND, OR, NOT and XOR). The idea here is that (quite like in real bombs I guess) a clock triggers the explosive by emmitting current over a network of connected logic gates. Each logic gate is represented as a circuit board that has an amount of input connections and one output connection.

For example take this AND gate:

It will set the outgoing connection to active if all incomming connections are active. As already mentioned I also implemented OR, NOT and XOR gates. In the finished game the logic gates then look like this:

All you have to do now as player is to cut the correct wires. This is especially tricky if NOT or XOR is involved. You can also see in this screenshot that the activated wires are in bright colors and all not activated wires are more or less gray.

In my original entry which I did in 48h, the most criticized part of the game was the random level generator, because it produced too easy levels. So I completely redid the level generator for this post-mortem. The new level generator now tests every level if it is complex enough according to the current difficulty setting. It also (of course) makes sure the level is solvable in the first place. Here you can see some gameplay:

I also added three difficulty settings to the game. One "newbie" setting that doubles the time on the clock to 20 seconds, and one "Insane" setting where all cables are gray no matter what their activation state is.

The post-mortem version of the game is available for PC (Windows, OSX, Linux) and I also ported it to Android (Tablets). Except for the Android version (which took me some time), all versions are Freeware. You can download all versions here and test the game for yourself:

The original LD entry is here if you want to see what the game looked after 48h. You can also take a look at the (java) code of the original LD version here.

Built using Box2D right? This looks really good and polished! I'm going to see quite a lot of bombs blow up these next couple days. This is a really good job and I'm really happy you made a post mortem version.

The beginning levels are too easy. OR gates are easy because you just need to click really fast and AND gates are easy because one wire can be cut in addition to the same strategy that works for OR gates. Adding NOR, NAND, and XNOR gates would make the game much more challenging. One time a level began with 2 seconds remaining on the timer. I think it was lag but I did not experience 8 seconds of it. Combining not gates with gate inputs (and outputs) would also make the game more challenging because you would have to think about whether to cut a given wire instead of just jumping to cut everything.

The beginning levels are too easy. OR gates are easy because you just need to click really fast and AND gates are easy because one wire can be cut in addition to the same strategy that works for OR gates. Adding NOR, NAND, and XNOR gates would make the game much more challenging. One time a level began with 2 seconds remaining on the timer. I think it was lag but I did not experience 8 seconds of it. Combining not gates with gate inputs (and outputs) would also make the game more challenging because you would have to think about whether to cut a given wire instead of just jumping to cut everything.

Interessting proposal - maybe I will add NOR, NAND and XNOR gates in a future update. But you did play the post-mortem version, right? You should try a level with XOR - these are quite challenging and not as easy as you described